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TOKYO--Toshiba and NEC said Monday they are planning a new format for next-generation DVDs that would cut costs but be incompatible with a format proposed by Sony and other industry giants.
A Toshiba representative said that the companies' planned standard for high-capacity blue-laser discs, which could hit the market as early as next year, was preferable to other standards because it would allow greater compatibility with existing red-laser discs.
She added that while the format would be incompatible with the Blu-ray blue-laser DVD (digital versatile discs) standard proposed earlier this year by Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial and others, Toshiba was still developing Blu-ray technology and may support it in the future.
"As the first market (for blue-laser DVDs), our view is that it would be best to have compatibility with existing DVDs," she said.
"In the future, these two would not necessarily be competing standards," she added, suggesting that it was possible the Blu-ray format may eventually become the industry standard for blue lasers.
Japan's electronics industry has placed high hopes on blue-laser DVDs, which can store several times more data than red-laser discs because of the shorter wavelength of blue light--enough to hold a typical high-definition motion picture on a single disc.
Toshiba-NEC's format would also top the recording capacity of Blu-Ray, which can hold 27GB of data on each side of the disc -- new technology would allow 40GBs on each side. Toshiba's reps said anyway that they believe Blu-Ray has its place in the world, suggesting that their technology might be used as a "gateway" to convert DVD plants to use blue-laser technology and later on convert them to use Blu-Ray. Neither of the companies, Toshiba nor NEC, are members of Blu-Ray consortium
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